"I continue to produce small, small, small architectures, such as this ceramic piece, for example, a little like monuments, a little like tombs, a little like the abandoned temples of the gods, a little like the ruins of the ancient and unknown civilization in which something, the say, was known; it is said that they understood the axes, the curves, the intersections, perhaps even the causation of the courses of the cosmic bodies, along which each day slide the private vertices of the atoms that make up our fragile flesh and blood". Ettore Sottsass.

Memphis was not to appear on the scene for another ten years, but Ettore Sottsass had already by then been visiting India for a decade. His "little architectures", such as the flower vase Shiva in pink glazed ceramic for BD Barcelona, owe a great deal to that culture. Dimensions: 17 cm (W) x 23 cm (H) x 7 cm (D).